A first post - can you identify this picture

[whole diary]

[Phil Farmer]

Can you identify this standard guage goods platform, located within the area served by Great Western Trains - it is fully maintained and has a small locomotive service siding and a narrow guage railway adjacent.      It is yards from the main line but has not been connected for many years...

[Phil]

Yes I can (but then again I worked down there for years, so I'll leave it open to others....)

[paul7575]

One of the CAD transfer sidings in the Corsham complex.  Accessed from a siding at the eastern entrance to Box tunnel IIRC^▸ (if I recall/remember/read correctly)

Paul

[grahame]

Phil Farmer - many thanks for your first post.  Fascinating picture ... and even before I read the follow ups, I would have made an educated guess to Box / Corsham.

[Phil]

One often overlooked point about that place is that although the conspiracy theorists would have you believe that the "strategic reserve" of steam locos was kept down there, there is as far as I could make out at least no smoke blackening whatsoever in the tunnel mouth (where it was originally connected to the main line) or on the roof, suggesting to me at least that no locomotive(s) in steam ever actually passed by that way.

[moonrakerz]

the conspiracy theorists would have you believe that the "strategic reserve" of steam locos was kept down there

There is still a huge amount of rubbish on the web about what was, or still is, down there. It always amuses me that when they don't know what is/was there, they always refer to it as a "secret nuclear bunker", what ever that might be. Coal bunker, golf course bunker ?

This is quite a good book about what actually was there !
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Secret-Underground-Cities-Britains-Subterranean/dp/0850527333/ref=pd_sim_b_1
It is available from the (Wiltshire) libraries. 

[Phil]

It always amuses me that when they don't know what is/was there, they always refer to it as a "secret nuclear bunker", what ever that might be. Coal bunker, golf course bunker ?

I think what they mean is a bunker in the wartime sense of the term, i.e. a command and control centre. I have a feeling Churchill may have introduced the term, but I could be wrong.

Parts of the miles of tunnels deep under the ground near Corsham, where Bath Stone had been quarried out since early Victorian times, were developed during the height of Cold War paranoia as a control centre for the Government should the unimaginable actually happen, and it's remained the mothballed (and thankfully unused) ever since. So in that sense I suppose it is a "Secret" and "Nuclear" "Bunker".

It's been decommissioned now, but still isn't open to the public. The air temperature and humidity is completely stable down there so nothing rusts or rots, and looking around the place is like walking into a time capsule. There's living accomodation, kitchens, stores, a hospital; everything a few hundred people would need to live for months if necessary undergound (including vast lakes of pure water, now gradually reclaiming many of the smaller quarries)

I was last down there just a couple of months ago and took this photo (amongst many more) of the telephone exchange which formed part of the emergency command and control centre. Quite who the operators down there were supposed to speak to above ground in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust is unclear, since presumably everyone else would have been wiped out. It's one of the old style "plug and socket" type exchanges. Note how the chairs still have their protective paper wrapping, just as they were delivered from the factory. The telephone directories were last updated in 1967.

[Electric train]

Quite who the operators down there were supposed to speak to above ground in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust is unclear, since presumably everyone else would have been wiped out.

There was a whole network of such places with underground or subsurface bunkers, there were regional and area centers there were also Royal Observer Corps observation posts most of which were no more than a buried concrete box on hill tops accessed by a manhole they had a periscope a couple of bunk beds and a telephone linked to the local area control.

All these centers were linked by deep buried Government telephone network (GTN) trunk cable, which was maintained by the GPO^‡(resolve), there were both telephone and telex systems, linked in with this was the Siren system the control of which was a Police stations.

Would the system have worked if there was a big bang who knows